[carlmr]

>Despite how high the accident rate is, people are actually really really good at driving. And computers are really really bad at being reliable.

Human swarm behavior is terrible (that's your rush hour traffic for you). And computers are very very reliable. The only question is whether they can be programmed in a way to handle enough edge cases to be feasible.

I'm with you in thinking that for the next 20 years we'll see a lot of automation on high ways but not in cities. On the highways there's very much less variability, and less erratic human driving. For me that's already 99% of what I would buy a self driving car for. I'm happy driving short trips through the city. I hate driving home for 2-3h and not being able to do anything else.